Abstract ID: 3.11955 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

This paper reports on studies (2023-2025) using VGI data of outdoor sports from Strava, a private platform, and Outdoorvision, a French Ministry of Sports platform aggregating data from multiple platforms. We studied nine natural areas in the Drôme department and the Grenoble Alpes Métropole area (France). Although platforms have built-in protocols for removing outliers, they still retain inconsistent records. Then, we address the technical and methodological issues involved in data acquisition, processing, and cleaning. The socio-demographic analysis reveals trends concerning the age and gender of the people who practice outdoor sports producing VGI. Highlighting that certain profiles are more represented in terms of number of people than in terms of intensity of use, we show the methodological interest of distinguishing between user accounts and the distances covered by each user. The temporal analysis reveals an overall seasonal pattern. More precisely, we distinguish between rural natural areas, where activities tend to be spread out over the day, and peri-urban natural areas, where activities take place much more evenly throughout the year, but are concentrated on everyday leisure activities temporalities. The spatial diffusion analysis of visits shows that peri-urban natural areas have higher visitor densities than rural natural areas, but with less concentration of flows, varying much more according to the type of day. The last analysis aims to establish (non-)relationships between meteorological patterns and visits. In peri-urban natural areas, it seems that there is no relation. As for rural natural areas, temperatures seem positively correlated. This result is logical considering the seasonal nature of outdoor sports, but this correlation is stronger on weekend days, which indicates an effect of temperature beyond that of seasonality. Finally, we relativize our results considering the representativeness of our data. Comparing Strava and Outdoorvision data with local eco-counters, we show that VGI of outdoor sports represents a small proportion of practices and that this representativeness is quite variable from one place and time to another. Technical constraints and the varying propensities to use connected tools during practice could explain it, without it being possible to measure the effect of each of these two logics.